• eWeek, Tuesday, December 8, 2009 2:58 PM

Google Wave is rolling out to 1 million users, while Gmail's offline capability has apparently graduated from Gmail Labs. Wave was sent to only 100,000 users in its initial public preview in late September. According to eWeek, that made Wave pretty boring, if not ineffective, because the platform thrives when multiple users are collaborating on documents or projects, "despite the fact that all of the users' editing cursors can be fairly noisy and overwhelming for the uninitiated."

In response, the Wave team agreed to send out invites to anyone who requested one through Google's online form. Separately, nearly a year after its launch, the search giant's offline access for Gmail has graduated from being a Google Gears-based experiment in Gmail Labs to an official Gmail feature. Why? "Offline access is essentially a stopgap to curb productivity loss," and particularly among frequent fliers.

Read the whole story at eWeek »